This invention relates to a system for supporting communications within an organization, and more particularly, to a technology for improving communications of an organization.
In recent years, sensor network systems constituted of a small-sized wireless sensor node (hereinafter, referred to as sensor node) which is equipped with a sensor function, a relay terminal, a base station, and a sensor net management server (hereinafter, referred to as management server) are being developed. The sensor node measures the state or the like (sensor data) of a person or a place, and the measured sensor data is relayed to the relay terminal by multi-hopping to be transmitted to the management server via the base station. The management server executes various types of processing based on the received sensor data.
The key device in a sensor network system is the sensor node, which has the characteristics of being small and low power. The sensor node can be attached anywhere including environments and people because of its small size, and can run for several years on a battery without being fed from an external power supply because of its low power. Efforts to make the sensor node wearable are advancing steadily. Researches are underway on a wrist band-type device for measuring pulse and temperature constantly as discussed in Non Patent Literature 1 and on a name tag-type device for measuring with infrared rays the amount of face-to-face communication between persons and the amount of speech as discussed in Non Patent Literature 2.
Researches on the analysis of the relation between a communication pattern in an organization and productivity that uses a name tag-type wearable sensor have also started. In Non Patent Literature 3, nine hundred business operations that involve system configuration within an office have been studied to statistically analyze the relation between the length of time from the reception of a configuration request to the completion of the configuration and a communication pattern. In addition to the simple length of communication and personnel count, various communication patterns have been made into indices to be examined in relation to productivity. The obtained conclusion is that, while there is no relation between the simple length of communication or personnel count and productivity, a person higher in an index called cohesion has higher productivity.
In researches on an organization network as in Non Patent Literature 3, communications in an organization is primarily expressed by a network graph in which each employee is treated as one node and the amount of communication between employees is represented by a line between nodes. The line between nodes is drawn when the amount of communication between employees is equal to or larger than a certain threshold. For example, five minutes or more of communication per day on average is defined as a significant communication to exclude a brief contact which lasts less than five minutes, such as when employees simply pass each other or simply exchange greetings. The above-mentioned cohesion indicates, for each node in the graph, the crossline density of the network around the node, and is also called a clustering coefficient. The cohesion is specifically an index indicating the proportion of adjacent nodes that are connected to one node and that are also connected to each other. In the case where one node A has N adjacent nodes, there are N(N−1)/2 connections if every two nodes selected from among the N nodes are connected to each other. The cohesion is the ratio of actual connections out of all possible connections and, when the number of actual connections is M, for example, is calculated as M/N(N−1)/2).